Mr. Speaker, increasingly, and I mean daily, the railways across the country are operating as virtual pipelines.
From virtually none in 2008, the number of barrels of oil moving across the country, through towns and cities, has grown exponentially. There were 200,000 barrels of oil shipped per day in 2013. This year an estimated 1 million barrels per day and next year an anticipated 1.4 million barrels will move through towns and cities, through farmland, by lakes and across rivers.
When this began, we had one inspector for every fourteen tanker cars of oil. As of last year, there was one inspector for every four thousand tanker cars of oil.
Since the devastation of the Lac-Mégantic derailment, including the deaths of 47 people, Transport Canada has hired just one additional inspector. That is over a period of two years. This is not what concern for public safety looks like. It is quite the opposite. It is a demonstration of profound disregard for what has transpired, for the risks that confront us daily and increasingly, and for the prospects of a more and ever-greater catastrophe as trains full of oil roll through densely populated urban Canada with increasing frequency.
While the bill, by way of establishing minimum insurance levels and a pooled disaster relief fund, and by increasing the authority of rail safety inspectors, is a small step forward, we support the bill because we believe it is essential to immediately improve the liability and accountability regime of Canada's railways. In the aftermath of Lac-Mégantic, the Government of Quebec, and by extension the public of Quebec, has been left with a liability of close to a half a billion dollars.
The bill does not nearly come close to acknowledging the nature of the problem, the urgency posed by the risks, the enormity of the potential disaster, the concerns of Canadians and, most critically, it fails to acknowledge the government's unequivocal responsibility for ensuring the safety of the Canadian public.